Nostalgia for the outhouse in Vermont

Aug. 4, 2012

Written by

Free Press Staff Writer

Resources:

• “Backcountry Sanitation Manual,” a 220-page, indexed discussion that includes diagrams on how to build various kinds of privies. Published on line by the Appalachian Trail Conference.Go to: http://bit.ly/LWdwdd• “The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure,” by Joseph Jenkins, 2005, Chelsea Green Publishing, $25.

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SOUTH DUXBURY — — Regular Sunday services haven’t been held at the old Congregational Church here in 30 years or so, but now and then, someone will get married in this picture-postcard setting. The building is serviceable, but there’s something about it that wedding parties really should know in advance.

The church has no flush toilet. An outhouse is out back, a two-holer. It’s functional — so you might say it’s suitable for weddings, at least some kinds of weddings — but it doesn’t seem to get used much. This spring, a bird’s nest sat on the platform between the two holes. Chances are it was put there by an outhouse prankster, but who knows, maybe a bird built it there for the solitude.

Like phone booths and steam engines, traditional outhouses such as this one, which sits atop a pit latrine, are disappearing from the landscape. You can still find them here and there, in camps, or on remote trails, grandfathered to survive the clean water standards that came into play in the 1970s.

Not that outhouses aren’t needed any more, far from it. There will always be places where sewers can’t be counted on to dispose of human waste. The Green Mountain Club has been wrestling with this problem for many years. One of its members was instrumental in coming up with the “moldering privy” which — along with the more labor-intensive batch-bin privy — has become a popular alternative in the back country. Both turn out a product that, with enough seasoning, can nourish the earth.

Those last words bring to mind the rhapsody to human excrement that Victor Hugo worked into “Les Miserables”:

“(T)he fetid streams of subterranean slime that the pavement hides from you, do you know what all this is?” Hugo wrote in “The Intestine of the Leviathan,” Book Two of the final Jean Valjean section. “It is the flowering meadow, it is the green grass, it is majoram and thyme and sage, it is game ... it is bread on your table, it is warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is joy, it is life.”

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That, at any rate, was the potential of Parisian sewage, but instead, Hugo lamented, the city let it flow into the sea. He was writing about sewers, of course, but what he says about the “wealth” of human manure applies to rural deposits as well, except that Hugo — urban sophisticate that he was — asserts that big-city waste is superior.

“There is no guano comparable in fertility to the detritus of a capital,” he raves. “A great city is the most powerful of dung producers.”

Meanwhile, across the fertile Atlantic Ocean, Burlington’s 19th-century health officers were offering somewhat less fulsome descriptions of Vermont’s great city. The report of 1866, based on “a thorough and systematic visitation and inspection of every house and every yard in the city,” said this about Burlington’s South Ward:

“There are sixty persons who are without privies of any kind; they make use of yards and streets as substitutes, consequently their premises are in a disgusting and very filthy condition.

“There are 681 persons who make use of privies which are very filthy; some of them are constructed over vaults or trenches from three to six feet deep, which are seldom or never cleaned, and others are built entirely above ground and equally neglected.”

Things apparently didn’t improve much over the next few years. “Foul privies and foul drainage take the lead as nuisances,” wrote the health officer in the 1880 report.

“The city sewer which commences in Maiden Lane and empties in to the South cove is a nuisance from beginning to end and along its whole course, compromising the health and lives of all who are exposed to it.”

Meanwhile, back across the Atlantic again, in the fourth chapter of Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Leopold Bloom prepares to relieve himself in an outhouse he calls “the jakes.”

Back in Vermont, “Tipping over outhouses was a popular Halloween prank,” recalled Winston Way, who grew up in North Hero in the 1920s and 1930s. He said one of the town’s “prominent” figures fell in during one of these escapades.

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“I don’t know how he got cleaned,” Way said. “I won’t say his name.”

“I remember that one room schoolhouses had outhouses,” wrote Larry Myott in an email. He grew up on a farm in Franklin and worked for the extension for 28 years. “They were attached to the building, as did the old Grange Halls and probably most other public buildings.”

“When I was about 14 years old my parents allowed me to tear down the outhouse, after much assurance that we were not going to need it anymore. My dad always cleaned out the outhouse in the summer. He would open the side of the outhouse, hitch a draft horse to this big wood box and drag it out from under the structure. Then he loaded the contents into the farm manure spreader before heading to the fields.”

Nowadays, in far-flung places beyond the reach of sewers or septic fields, composting toilets are fashionable. (The moldering variety relies in part on red wiggler worms — each privy gets a mass of worms about the size of baseball, “The Backcountry Sanitation Manual” advises.) Even the outhouse superstructure has gotten a 21st century update:

In 2010, Vermont State Parks sponsored an outhouse design contest. Nine entries came in from eight architectural firms. The winning design, by designer Kelley Osgood of Cushman Design Group, used natural materials that could be readily carried in pieces to a remote site and assembled there.

David Carter, a lawyer in South Hero, had a novel design idea as a young man in law school. He saw an outhouse platform at a yard sale — a two-holer, about 2 feet wide by 4½ feet long. He took it home, sanded it, finished it, put it on legs, and made a coffee table out of it.

He put house plants in the holes. He’d have guests over and they’d put their drinks on his coffee table..

“They’d ask, how did you make this?” Carter said. “Then the truth would come out, and they’d say, ‘Oh.’”

“It was an interesting topic of conversation,” he said. More interesting than many coffee table books, certainly.

The years passed, Carter got married, his furniture got upgraded. He doesn’t have that coffee table any more.